The main reason for this third article originates from an article about SEO poisoning that was posted a few days ago at Websense. SEO poisoning describes a method of using SEO to rank rogue websites highly in the search engines for specific search terms.

The release of Microsoft's Security Essentials software seems to have sparked rogue websites that rank highly for related search terms. They do not offer the Microsoft product for download but a rogue antivirus software that is infecting the computer system instead when installed on it.

While Ghacks readers know to distinguish between rogue and legitimate versions of antivirus software, at least some Internet users seem to download files from the first link that search engines present to them without further verifying if it is legitimate or not.

The best way to download Microsoft Security Essentials is therefor directly from Microsoft. You can point your web browser directly to the Security Essentials website which is hosted on Microsoft.com.

Make sure you verify the address before you start the download. As long as you are on http://*.microsoft.com/* you are fine and can proceed with the download of the application.

The most recent design of the download page has changed and looks like this now.

The only valid alternatives are trusted download portals like Softpedia or Betanews but definitely not third party websites that are offering the download. Most experienced users may not have a problem distinguishing legit and rogue websites but many Internet users seem to have them as these rogue applications tend to get downloaded by a lot of users.

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About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.
You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

Comments

Tested out Microsoft Security Essentials. It’s purely signature base. That means no heuristic scanning. Avira is still the best free anti-virus scanner out there. Also, Security Essentials does not play nice with ZoneAlarm’s free firewall. I actually got the blue screen of death on a Vista machine with this.

However, the combination of Avira + ThreatFire + Comodo Firewall Pro (all free editions) is IMHO the best security combination out there. Robust security with virtually no false positives. And all three apps play nicely with each other. Which is a lot more than I can say about some of the so-called integrated suites I’ve tried

Use the above three apps, and stay on top of your Microsoft and Firefox updates, and you’ll be about as secure as it ‘s possible to be with a system as intrinsically insecure as Windows is.

Since I’ve starting using this combination, nothing (knock wood!) has gotten through to bite me.

About gHacks

Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.